Roamer's column

The eight-week campaign to elect a new leader for the Labour Party is over. It has been a very public affair, unlike the contests in 1992. It showed the blemishes that still cling to the MLP and, fair's fair, there was a refreshing openness about the whole affair even to the point of revealing, in a blistering post-mortem on the last election, just how dyed-in-the-wool were the leadership, the party machinery and all its works.

The affair ended last Friday after the failure of the delegates to give more than 50 per cent plus one of their votes to any of the five contenders. Joseph Muscat came within a whisker of that and it said much for George Abela that he came in second place from nowhere and with the party machinery clearly rooting for Muscat. Alfred Sant's bizarre resignation as Leader of the Opposition last week, when Charles Mangion was already acting Labour leader, suggesting strongly that there was no leader, was par for the course.

Now the party will close ranks, hunker down and begin its journey towards 2013. From this day forth, under Muscat who garnered 67 per cent of the final tally to Dr Abela's 33 per cent, its task will be to sever links with the decade-old Opposition (Will it? Can it?) and present itself to the electorate as a fresh alternative to the governing party. The next few days will be interesting.

For one thing, the new man will need to assert his leadership over the parliamentary group (he will be helped by the fact that barring a mutiny, which is unlikely, they will realise they have no option but to line up behind him. Still, Muscat will be a dull boy if he takes this for granted, if that little voice that prompted Henry Bollingbroke does not whisper the same observation in his ears: "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"); for another, he has to present himself to the voters out there as a breeze after the lamentable spectacle his party presented for the past 10 years; and for yet another he will have to reform and restructure an organisation, an administration and a media that are clearly past their sell-by dates - even if they did give him a helping hand.

None of these tests is an easy one. Was Muscat the right choice? It is said that the office makes the man. We will soon find out.

He has inherited a party that has not been well-led, structures verging on the incestuous, party machinery that, fatally, inhabited an ivory tower and created a fantasy about itself that did not go down well with its audience, in the same way that villains at a pantomime fail to attract sympathy, drawing boos instead.

Significantly, Muscat was a part of that panto where Abela was not. It was the latter who got the politics of the 1990s right, who was a strong element of the winning team that brought Sant to power, who helped to create New Labour, such as it was, who was ignored when he should have been listened to, who was part of none of the silliness that characterised the party's antics from 1998 to the beginning of this year. The delegates ignored all this, last Friday.

Muscat has youth and energy on his side. Within minutes of his election he was promising an "earthquake" of reform. That he cannot soldier on with people who were responsible for last March's debacle is clear; and one does not need the gift of prophecy to foretell that his selection of the shadow cabinet will show us where he intends to go and how he will get there.

Expect a whirlwind tour of the electoral districts even as the earthquake rumbles and the tectonic plates shift. And cock an ear in the direction of Tarxien to see how Mintoff reacts, if at all, to Dr Muscat's first appeal to forget the past and work towards the future in unity. Strange if the man who tumbled Sant remains silent.

We had some idea but...

It came as a shock for all that.

Years ago, I had touched on the subject of catechesis and pointed out, among other things, that there were teachers in State schools, non-believers, instructing primary schoolchildren in religion. This was a strange thing to be happening. Recently, I touched once more on the matter of catechesis.

I suggested that in a Malta growing more secular as it apes or adopts ideas from European and American friends, the business of providing sound instruction in the faith, or failing to provide it, as it seemed to me, further aggravated the risk of a new generation growing up minus a Catholic education to guide them in their daily lives.

This, coupled with the more serious problem of families forgetting that they are primarily responsible for the education of their children, made for a risk-filled situation.

Matters are worse when we consider, as the Declaration on Christian Education that emerged from the Second Vatican Council did consider, that 'Education is, in a very special way, the concern of the Church, not only because the Church must be recognised as a human society capable of imparting education, but especially as it has the duty of proclaiming the way of salvation to all men, of revealing the life of Christ to those who believe, and of assisting them with unremitting care so that they may be able to attain the fullness of that life.'

In Church schools this responsibility is self-evident; but the declaration insists it also has a 'grave obligation' to see to it that children in State schools are given 'special attention and help...'

Last Tuesday, the Secretariat for Catechesis issued a document that was startling in its content and blunt in its admission that the Church had been slow to respond to changes in education and society: '...various areas are in need of immediate attention'.

The document identifies those requirements: revision of text books, the ongoing formation of teachers, availability of religious counselling in schools, outdated syllabuses and texts, the situation in primary schools (primary schools!) where more and more children are being taught religion by teachers who are either non-practising Catholics or have rejected Christianity.

We were given to understand that religious instruction by people who had rejected the faith was not as damaging as it sounded.

Rum; so it was with some relief that we learned "it may be the right time for education authorities to consider the introduction of school-based religious education teachers, who would support the primary class teachers, teaching the subject instead of those who do not feel comfortable".

It is a well-known dictum that the Church deals with eternity and works within that non-time framework.

There is something comforting in that; it means that we don't have a Church that will jump this way and that in a tortuous effort to move with the times, a propos of which Chesterton had once remarked that we do not want a Church that moves with the times but a "Church that moves the times".

To do this, however, there is a need for action. It has taken four years to draw up what the Secretariat for Catechesis is calling a consultative document.

It will not be until December that a plan is drawn up to prepare the new syllabuses and a strategy for the development of textbooks; and another two years before these are introduced to schools and, presumably, to parishes and other catechetical centres.

The positive element in all this is that the Church has come to grips, albeit it took an unseasonably, unreasonably long time to get there, with a dire situation. The idea of setting up a Religious Education office to cater for school needs, for those of teachers and students, the promotion of research and the ongoing formation of teaches is excellent and should have been in place ever since the Church Schools crisis fanned by the socialist regime of the early 1980s.

If this document had been drawn up 12 years ago, four years after the Catechism of the Catholic Church, itself so long in preparation, had been published, perhaps a sounder formation of a generation of children would not have been forfeited; perhaps some of our teenagers would not be having casual sex and contracting sexually transmitted infections, about which more another time; perhaps some of those who entered into the state of marriage would have done so with more care. The answer now is to lap up the spilt milk and start on a new bottle.

SS tactics!

John McCain beware! America, take heed! Sarah Sarandon has declared that she will leave the country if John McCain is elected President of the United States.

My prayers for McCain intensified as of the moment I heard that news.